Editing photos on iPad just got easier

Adobe releases Lightroom Mobile, which lets you sync RAW photos and edit them on the fly using your iPad.

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The iPad is an increasingly important tool for professional photographers. And the photography community has long been calling on Adobe to develop an iPad version of its powerful photo editing and organisation app, Lightroom 5.

Problem was, both from a storage and a processing point of view, the iPad isn't the best device for dealing with huge numbers of enormous, RAW files. So with its new Lightroom Mobile app, released today, Adobe's done something quite clever.

It's squared the aforementioned circle by creating a way to edit RAW photos on your iPad without having to actually download them.

Smart Previews

Smart Previews lets you view RAW photos on the iPad without downloading the entire files

Instead, RAW files in Lightroom 5 can be synced between your iPad and desktop via the Creative Cloud. And here's the clever bit: a special 'Smart Previews' feature turns these giant files into much smaller compressed versions that your iPad can handle with aplomb.

While they're compressed, though, the files still contain enough data that they can be usefully edited and manipulated with the Lightroom Mobile app, which contains the crop tool, built-in tone presets and some of the more basic editing tools of Lightroom 5.

Many, if not all, of the editing tools from Lightroom 5 are available in the app

So you can make adjustments to things like the exposure, colour temperature, saturation and so on - and because the files are relatively small, edits are applied almost instantly.

Lossless transfer

Once you're happy with your changes, you can then transfer your edits losslessly back to the original RAW file on your desktop. This also takes place quickly - because all that gets sent via the Cloud is a tiny XML file containing your changes.

Once you've made your edits, Lightroom Mobile syncs them to the original file on your desktop